A figure appears to have been subsumed by a bookcase, and another is swathed in a green sleeping bag beneath a makeshift tent. Whether navigating a bathtub fitted with oars or sleeping in a bed while stacked like pancakes, the figures in Sara Anstis’ atmospheric drawings are immersed in curious activities. Hints of mysterious narratives, nursery rhymes, art historical iconography, and ancient symbolism make their way into enchanting and peculiar tableaux.
Anstis conjures a timeless air in the small-scale works of her solo show Pastels at Olney Gleason. Over the past couple of years, her palette has shifted to more muted, autumnal tones in contrast to her earlier works that featured vibrant, saturated hues and an almost glowing, neon quality. Recently, she’s looked to art history, particularly medieval and early Renaissance works.
The stoic, three-quarter profiles of figure in “The Horse Rider,” for example, reflects expressions seen in the 15th-century work of the likes of Fra Angelico and Hans Memling. “The Painter” ties in the medieval art tradition of placing saints at the foot of a holy figure, this time depicted as women peering reverently not only toward a female artist but the empowering drawn likeness of a woman’s form.
Another recurring animal motif we closely associate with Leonardo da Vinci and his masterpiece “Lady with an Ermine.” For Anstis, these tributes are small in scale but rich in the recognition of women with a variety of talents and interests, not the least of which include motherhood.
The maternal theme emerges in works throughout the exhibition, influenced partly by German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker’s 1906 painting “Self-Portrait at 6th Wedding Anniversary.” Soft pastels are a symbolic and practical medium, building compositions that explore the fuzziness of dreams and the blurred edges of folk stories. “Three heads in a bed,” for example, brings to mind the nursery rhyme “Ten in the Bed,” which is sometimes sung as “Three in the Bed.”
Long interested in mythology and subjectivity, Anstis renders figures and symbolic objects amid surreal settings. Some works adhere more closely to the conventions of portraiture while others reveal an array of enigmatic, narrative elements. Two disembodied arms hold a small dog around a woman’s shoulders in “The Milkman,” for instance, and a pensive woman walks by a display of numerous tiny vials in “Lachrymatories,” which in ancient Greece and Rome were used to hold perfumes but were once thought to collect mourners’ tears, earning them the name “tear bottles.”
Through the use of pastels, Anstis retains “an intimate sense of touch that charges her scenes with introspective intensity,” the gallery says. The women in her works fully embody their surroundings, both emotionally and physically connecting to their activities, be it horseback riding, reading, or painting. Throughout, she evokes an air of veneration, as if to every scene there is some underlying rite or observance of which we’re only seeing a fragment. The artist tips her hat to the absurd, even the slightly cartoonish, tapping into the seductive irrationality of dreams and the imagination.
Pastels is on view through October 24 in New York City. See more on the artist’s Instagram.
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